The StartUp & Entrepreneurship Conference 20th April 2017 Dear guests, It is with great interest that I am here today at the StartUp & Entrepreneurship Conference. The floor today does not belong to politicians or government officials like myself but to successful practitioners, academics, young people with new ideas, and to all those who can really create added value, income and jobs to our economy. What is entrepreneurship? It is a way people take control of their lives. Our key role as a government is to facilitate entrepreneurship and innovation and allow it to flourish, not to substitute it or dictate how it’s done by old, tried and failed methods of central planning. And it is true that entrepreneurship has been battered both in Cyprus but also in many countries Europe in general, in the years that preceded the crisis, by flawed policies of red tape, distorted government intervention, protection and irrational public and private borrowing. I hope that the crisis has been an enlightening moment for all of us and the turning point to the return to basic principles of promoting entrepreneurship using modern tools. Our aim is to create a new generation of future innovators and real entrepreneurs and not a new generation aspiring to become civil servants. Cyprus businesses are entrepreneurial by nature, but they need the government behaving as an enabler and not an inhibitor for Cyprus to become an attractive place for entrepreneurial oriented individuals and teams to establish operate and grow their business. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is slowly but steadily growing and I am confident that in the years to come, innovation and entrepreneurship will drive social and economic growth in the island. I was happily surprised by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor results whereby 72.7% of respondents in Cyprus now consider entrepreneurship as a good career